Chapter 4: The Second Collapse

The rain came back and stayed, and after a while it was just part of the noise — the generator, the rain on the tarp, the floodlights ticking as they cooled.

Theo sat on the tailgate with the two pages beside him and the pen in his hand. He had been sitting there long enough that the pen had warmed up. He read the second page again. It was the same as the first page, mostly, in worse sentences. At the bottom there were two lines for two signatures, and one of the lines already had a signature on it, in blue, with a small hard tick at the end of the last letter, the way people sign who have signed a great many things.

Under Voss’s folded raincoat, weighted flat, were the four printed sheets: the carved figures, flat-lit, a scale bar along the bottom of each, a number penciled on the border.

“Pen’s still there,” Voss said. She was ten feet away with her camera up, shooting the floodlight mast.

“I know.”

“It’s not going to get more interesting.”

Theo put the pen down on the blank line and looked at the crack instead. It was a black seam in the mud, six feet long, with the timbering showing at one end like a broken tooth. The excavation had cut a slot in the capstone to get a camera down, and the slot had grown, and then grown again, and the crew had shored it and gone home and been called back and shored it a second time. Under the floodlights the mud around it had a shine to it.

The generator changed pitch when the compressor kicked on, and Theo’s back teeth changed with it.

He had stopped trying to work out which of the two men in raincoats was which. One of them was eating out of a plastic bag, standing up, methodically: one thing out, eaten, wrapper back in the bag. The other was somewhere behind the light truck. The kid with the camera was on his knees by the crack with a battery in his hand, blowing on it.

Between the generator and the rain, there was a fine dry sound.

It was under the generator. It had been under the generator for a while, and Theo had let it be the generator. Then he stopped letting it.

“Does anybody else,” he said, and stopped.

The kid with the camera looked up. The man with the bag stopped chewing. The rain went on.

“Nothing,” Theo said.

“Go on,” Voss said. She had lowered the camera.

“It’s a sound.” He listened. It was there. “Dry. A lot of small things moving at once, over each other. It’s the one from ten minutes ago. I asked if anybody heard it.”

“You asked if anybody heard the rain,” the man with the bag said, and looked at the ground around his boots, and then at Theo, with an expression of great and unhurried pleasure. “That’s a snake, son. That’s exactly what a snake sounds like, that dry moving, and I want you to know I’ve met one other person in my life who could hear a snake through a generator, and he was from Kentucky, and he was lying. Kidding. He wasn’t lying. He was from Kentucky.”

“Copperheads,” the kid with the camera said, and made a face. “There’s a den up the slope behind the barn. County’s been meaning to do something about it since I was in middle school.”

“They don’t chase.”

“That one chased Davey Pruitt’s dog.”

“That dog’s an idiot.”

Theo stood up and stepped back from the crack.

“Hey,” the man with the bag said. “No. Don’t do that. You go quiet and back away, that’s what prey does.”

“I’m not prey.”

“Everybody’s prey.” He got a broom handle out of the truck and threw it to the kid and took a second one for himself. “Two minutes. We’ll look like we know what we’re doing.”

They beat the ground. They went around the crack and along the orange fence and up the slope toward the barn and came back, and the kid found a paper cup, and by the fence line Theo found a length of orange cord, and the man with the bag found nothing and said that nothing was the find.

Voss had not moved. She was watching Theo, not the ground, with her camera down at her side and the lens cap off.

“Copperhead’s not a bad way to go,” the man with the bag said, putting his broom handle back. “You get the antivenom at Marrow Hill, it’s four hours in a chair and a bill you’ll remember. It’s the timber rattlers you want to watch. Nobody sees the timber rattler. You just hear it after.”

“That’s not true,” the kid said. “You hear it before.”

“You hear it during,” the man said, and looked pleased.

Theo sat back down on the tailgate. His ears were hot. He had heard something — he was nearly sure he had heard something — and now it was gone and would stay gone as long as he had witnesses, and on the ground there was a paper cup and a length of orange cord to show for it.

The radio clicked twice.

“—oss. Voss, are you receiving.” Quarles, from under the ground, his voice with the room in it. “Voss. We’re in the front room. There’s a platform. There’s a painted altar on it, and I want you to write down that the deposit above it is sealed. The cap is sealed. Do you understand what I’m —“ Static. “— I’m saying.”

“I understand you,” Voss said into the radio. She had her notebook out.

“This is older than the county charter. Whatever this is, it was closed and it stayed closed, and nobody has been in it since they closed it, and the men who closed it were not —“ Static ate him. “— and I want that in the log before anybody says a word about the nineteenth century.”

“Are you hearing anything in there?” Voss said. “Anything moving?”

“Rats,” Quarles said. “Hollis is spraying. Is the boy still —“ Static. “— boy. Is the boy there.”

Voss held the radio out to Theo and moved the antenna an inch.

“Hi,” Theo said.

“Ah. Good.” Quarles’s voice changed gear. “Listen. We’ve found an object and I want your read on it before anybody puts a number on it. Small. Palm-sized. Square stock, the front’s carved out into a fan, and the whole thing was wrapped in a ribbon that’s rotted to threads. Silk, I’d guess, but we won’t know until the lab, so it’s silk. Tell me what I’m holding.”

Theo looked at the crack. He looked at the brown water running off the tarp.

“How small,” he said.

“Four inches. Five.”

“Then it’s not a real one. It’s the small size.” Theo put his hand flat in the air, showing Voss without meaning to. “A person’s fan is about this big. The ones the troupe carries — the Guise carries, in the parade — those are person-sized. The little ones are for the figures.”

“The what.”

“The carved figures. The ones in the photographs. The ones with the cut faces.” Theo heard himself say it and then heard how it sounded. “That’s how it works in the program. In her program. The big ones are for people and the small ones are for the figures, and the figures are the ones who do the —“

“Do the what.”

“The work,” Theo said, and then, because that was worse, “It’s staging. It’s how you stage it. You can’t have somebody in a mask holding a real fan and doing the walk, because a real fan weighs—“

He stopped.

“It’s a rehearsal prop,” he said. “Or it’s for them.”

“Ritual format,” Quarles said, and Theo could hear the pencil. “Practice size.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Voss, I’m putting it in the log as ritual fan, practice size, consultant’s identification. If anybody asks, it’s provisional.”

“It’s provisional,” Theo said.

“Of course it is. It’s all provisional.” Then, further away, not into the radio, muffled: “Hollis. Hollis, don’t touch the —“

The radio clicked. Then it clicked again, and then it was the generator again.

Voss took it back and turned the dial and got nothing, and turned it back and got a sound like a hand over the mouthpiece.

“That’s not a fault,” she said. “That’s them under a lot of rock.”

She set the radio down on her notebook. She had unzipped her coat, which she had not done all night, and her hand was in her inside pocket, resting there, not taking anything out.

“Practice size,” she said.

“I didn’t tell him practice size.”

“You told him enough to get it written down that way.” She looked at the crack. “He does that. Give him one word and it comes back as a label. Next week it’s in a state report with a photograph, and the photograph has a scale bar, and I have to explain how the label got there.”

“Then tell him.”

“He’s the one with the hole.” Voss took her hand out of her pocket. “Be careful with that word. Provisional. With him it means he already knows.”

Theo put his hands down flat on the diamond plate on either side of himself, and it was then that he felt it.

Under the truck. Not the generator. Not the compressor.

A knock. Then, after a moment, another knock, softer, in a different place, as if something had moved and knocked again. Then a sound with weight in it — something pressing and releasing, pressing and releasing, slow, a hand on the underside of a floor, testing.

Theo got down off the tailgate. His boots went into the mud, and the knock came up through the mud, directly under the crack.

“Hey,” he said.

“Get back from the edge,” Voss said.

The knock came again.

“Hey. Hey.” He was moving backward. “Hey. Hey —“

“Don’t run,” Voss said, sharp. “Don’t —“

He had heard it and could not stop hearing it. Something was putting its weight on a surface it could not see the top of, patiently, testing.

He took two steps and the ground went out from under him. Voss’s hand closed on his sleeve and then her weight came forward over the edge with his, and the edge was gone, and they went down.

The fall was short and full of sand.

He came to on his side with grit in his teeth and his cheek stinging, and his first clear thought was that he had not fallen far enough. The room with the platform and the altar was forty feet up and behind him. He had fallen twelve, maybe, and hit something with a floor on it.

He spat. The taste was old dirt and, under it, a sweetish chemical rot, like the inside of a chest freezer after a power outage.

Sound came back in pieces: grit still coming down, a long settle, then a knock, then another, small stones rearranging themselves somewhere above.

“Marsh.” Voss’s voice, close by and unsteady, and then steadier. “Marsh. Say something.”

“I’m okay.” It came out a rasp. He pushed up onto his elbows. “I think I’m okay. Are you —“

“Don’t get up fast.” A rattle of a flashlight, then a cone of light, and the beam swung past his face and away. She was sitting against a wall of mud and stone about eight feet off. Her hair was down out of its clip. There was a gray stripe down the whole left side of her coat.

Above them, the ceiling of the hole was a jammed mess of mud, broken timber, and one sheet of the capstone, hanging.

Theo looked at the hanging stone. Voss looked at it too. Then they both looked away at the same time.

“Phone,” she said.

His was in his bag, in the truck, forty feet up in another world. She got hers out and looked at it without turning it on, and then showed it to him the way she had showed him the back of her camera. It was folded in the middle. The screen came on, showed the top half of a picture of a crack, and went out.

She found the radio and shook it. It made a noise like a maraca. She set it down.

From her outside pocket, careful, she took a flashlight the size of a stick of butter. Knurled ring, black crackle finish worn to bare metal at the edges, and when she clicked it the beam came out hard and white and did not flicker at all.

“That’s a good flashlight,” Theo said.

“Guy I know. Army surplus. He buys them by the case and gives them to people who go into holes.” She ran the beam along the wall. “It doesn’t die. I had it in a puddle for a day.”

“Give him my thanks.”

“Give him your thanks yourself. He’s up there.” She clicked it off to save it, and the dark came in all at once and was total. “No. Keep it on. Keep it on.”

She turned it back on. Her hands were not entirely steady, and she gripped the barrel until they were.

“All right.” Her voice had a desk in it now. “They’ll have a rig on that hole in twenty minutes. Thirty. They saw it go. They have a truck with a winch and a man who knows how to use it. What we do in the meantime is we do not stand under this ceiling. We move off the fall line. We find a clear spot, we sit down, and we wait.”

“Where.”

“Along the wall. There.” She pointed. “The rubble slopes up that way. If it goes again, it comes down the middle, and we’re not in the middle.”

He got up. His knees worked. His left hip hurt in a way that suggested it would hurt more later. He picked his way along the wall behind her light, and the wall was a cut in the earth with stones set into it in courses, and in places the earth had fallen out from between the stones and left holes that went on into nothing.

“Wait,” he said. “Should we be moving at all?”

“No.”

“You just said —“

“I said we move off the fall line.” Voss put a hand out and stopped him. “That’s not the same as going anywhere. Listen. This is not a rescue. This is what you do before the rescue. You get out of the way of the thing that already tried to kill you, you sit still, and you are findable. You don’t explore. You don’t go looking. Are we clear.”

“Clear.”

“Good.” Then, after a second: “I’m not going to pretend I’ve done this before.”

“You said —“

“I know what I said. It’s in the training. Everybody’s training has the cave-in unit in it, and nobody’s training has the part where it happens.” She turned the light on the rubble and judged the slope with the squint of a woman who had read the module. “I’m a desk officer. As of tonight, somebody has to say that out loud. I sign the paperwork. I run the files. Eleven years of the files.”

“You did all right on the worksheet.”

“The worksheet is the whole job.” She put her hand flat against the wall, looked at the ceiling, and then at him. “There’s you, and there’s me, and there’s one flashlight. And I’m the one who signed for the ground we’re standing under. Stay where I can see you and I’ll get you out.”

“Okay,” Theo said, and did not say anything about the desk officer, and after a moment she started moving.

“Twenty feet. Then we sit.”

“Miss Voss.” He did not move. It took her two steps to notice. “There’s something I need to say first. There’s a sound. Under us. It was under me up there, and it’s —“

He stopped, because it was not under them. The knocking had stopped. What was left was the room-noise, the fine settling of grit, and something else that was not nothing.

“Describe it,” she said.

“Dry. A lot of small things together. It’s the same sound. It’s the one from up there.” He listened again. “It stopped.”

“It’s a drain. Old ground, running water. It makes noises. It does it for years.” She said it flatly, watching him and not the walls. “You heard a sound in a hole. That’s all that happened. We go twenty feet. We sit. We wait. Say yes.”

“Yes,” Theo said.

They went twenty feet.

The passage did not run straight. It went down at a shallow angle, which Theo felt in his knees and in the way his boots kept reaching for a floor that was suddenly lower, and the walls came in until he could put his hands out and touch both sides, and then they opened again. The stones had been cut square and set in a hard white mortar, and in places the mortar was gone and the stones had been pushed out by roots or water and put back by somebody in a hurry, probably centuries ago, probably in April.

“Watch your head,” Voss said. “Doorway. I think. Something came down here. A lintel.”

“What came down here?”

“People. In the spring. They broke the seal, they pulled the traps —“ She caught herself. “There were bolt traps in the passages. Two of them. They were pulled out and tagged, and they’re in the truck, and the truck is up there. So the passage is clear. That’s what I know. That’s all I know, and it’s good news, so take it.”

They went another thirty feet. The floor was damp in patches and dry in others, and where it was damp it stank.

“The dig’s been down here for months,” Theo said. “Right? The crew. They come in, they go out, they wear headlamps.”

“Every day since April.”

“Then this isn’t anything. They’d know. Somebody would have seen it.” He was aware of talking too fast. “Archaeologists don’t go into a chamber every day and not see a —“

“Don’t say it.”

“I wasn’t going to say it.”

“You were going to say it.” Voss’s voice was tight. “There’s a camera down here. There was a camera —“

She stopped dead. Theo nearly walked into her back.

The passage ahead was dark. The beam went into it and kept going and lit nothing.

“You know what,” she said. “This is far enough.”

“Where’s the camera?”

“It gets dark. It’s a hole. Holes get dark.” She swung the light back the way they had come. “I’ve seen what I need to see. Nobody’s in this direction. We go back up the slope, we sit at the bottom of the fall, and we hear them when they get a rig in.”

Theo stood in the dark behind her and did not say anything.

Then, from ahead of them, low, muffled by a corner, a voice said something.

She had the light on it before Theo could work out what he had heard. Her whole body had changed.

“Mr. Hollis,” she said — a full voice, not a whisper, and the passage took the name and gave it back in pieces.

Nothing answered. The passage gave them the drip of water and their own breathing and nothing else.

“Mr. Hollis!” Louder, and not steady now, for a different reason. “Say something. Where are you —“

“There’s nobody,” Theo said.

“There was a voice.”

“It came from behind the wall. It could come from anywhere. It’s a hole, it’s —“ He got hold of her sleeve, meaning to be a weight on the end of her arm. “You said don’t go looking. You said.”

“I know what I said.” She took her arm back out of his hand, not roughly, distractedly, the way you take your arm back from a coat sleeve. “It’s Hollis. He’s forty feet from where he was. The ceiling came down on him too, or he came down the fall line, or —“

“He didn’t.”

“Come on,” she said, and went.

In the dark, without her face, she was a voice and a light and the way she stood with her shoulders square. The voice was saying stay behind me, watch your feet, and the body under the voice was moving faster and faster, and the faster it moved the quieter the voice got.

He followed. He was sixteen and there was a flashlight ahead of him.

The passage ended.

The light went out of the passage into a room and did not come back, because the room had no back wall to give it back.

“Away from the rubble,” Voss said, and then stopped, and said, “There’s nobody in here,” in a voice that had just caught up with the rest of her.

It was not like the room above, the one Quarles was in. The ceiling went too far up. The light on the floor was the only light and it was not enough to find the ceiling. Theo put his hand out until it touched the wall, and then moved his hand sideways because the wall kept going. He walked along it and counted his steps. At eight he stopped counting.

The walls were painted. Red and black. From six inches away it was a mess of long strokes with a brush, one over another. From half a step back it was coils — big loops that ran in bands along the base and climbed at the corners and turned and turned over each other, so that the whole wall was one long body in a knot.

“He’ll have a survey line,” Voss said. “A total station. If they came down, they’d have —“ She turned around in the middle of the room, and her light went over the floor, and the floor was full.

“Voss,” Theo said.

There were things on the floor. There were things everywhere. Bronze, and stone, and glass, and pieces that were two of those at once — a bowl with a gray-green glass lip and a bronze body, a jar of stone with a glass window set into its side. There was a low platform in the middle with a lacquered top gone to a dull matte brown, and on it a scatter of implements laid out in a row like a technician’s tools, and not one of them was a tool he could name.

“There’s no field on the form for this,” Voss said. She was not joking.

“Don’t touch it.”

“I am not going to touch it. I am going to stand here and look at it, and then we are going to go back up that passage.” She turned her light slowly, and stopped it. “Wait.”

“Don’t touch it.”

“I’m not touching it. Look.”

She had the light on something at the near corner, and Theo came and looked, keeping his hands to himself.

Two cats. Carved. Lying down, haunches folded, a good three feet long each, and they were not cats: they had the shoulders of cats and the faces of cats and the weight of some animal that has no cats in it. Their paws were up. Between them, held off the floor by their paws, was a drum.

It was bigger around than a bicycle tire. The skin was tight and pale and dusted with a fine white bloom, and Theo looked at it and then looked at the floor.

“Who holds a drum like that,” Voss said.

The frame came up around the drum on one side and over the top, and the frame was a bird. Red and black again. Long neck. A crest of three strokes. The tail came down in two pieces and took the drum’s weight on the far side of the cats, and the legs of the bird went down to the floor and became the stand, and there was no way a bird could hold a drum, and yet it was all one piece, and it had been holding the drum for a long time.

Theo looked at his boots.

“Not that,” Voss said. “Over here.”

The fan was on the lacquered platform, on its own, with a clear piece of floor all around it and nothing near it at all.

It was laid flat, and the light lay along it and made the silk shine, and it was the length of a man’s forearm from the hinge of the handle to the far tip of the leaf. The ribs were dark wood, wide at the head and thin as a thumbnail at the tip, and the top rib was longer than the rest and had a small carven head with a beak. The silk was yellowed and patched, and it had been painted with feathers.

The paint was still bright. That was the thing that got the back of Theo’s neck. Everything else in the room had gone brown, and the paint on this was still bright, and there was no reason for it.

“Peacock,” Voss said.

“Eye-spot.”

“Look at it. It’s a peacock.”

“It’s not.” Theo crouched beside the platform. “Or it might be. It’s the eye-spot pattern. Look at the bands — horizontal at the top, and then the round ones at the tips, in rings with the dark in the middle. A peacock’s got the same thing. It’s not only peacocks. It’s the pattern that says: this is the one you look at.” He made himself stop. “The one Quarles has. The little one. Same bands, same eyes, smaller. This is the person’s version and that’s the figure’s version.”

“And the one on the wall,” Voss said.

Theo looked at the wall. The coils.

“Her program,” he said.

“Your mother’s.”

“You know the Guise. The masks. The old parade, before it got to be a parade.” He was aware of the order his sentences were coming out in, and it was not a good order. “There used to be a walk in it. That’s what she says — she has this way of saying it. ‘There used to be a walk.’ A snake walk. Ninety years ago the whole street did it behind the masks, you can find the pictures. And then it went short, and now it’s a folk thing for tourists at Founders’ Weekend with a barbershop quartet.”

“And she put it back.”

“She put it in a theater.” He put a hand out toward the fan and did not touch it. “She’s got a whole program on it. She brings it to schools. The walk, the drum, the fan — it’s the whole thing. The bird’s on one side because the bird goes up, and the snake’s on the other because the snake goes down, and the bird has the snake. That’s what the bird is for. The snake’s the thing you’re afraid of and the bird’s the thing that takes it, so you stand between them, and you step —“

“Stepping where.”

“On the snake.” He heard his own voice in the room and did not like the size of it. “But not to kill it. That’s the trick of it. It isn’t killing. It puts the snake where it can’t move, and she calls that the Collar.”

Somewhere behind them, back in the passage, a stone settled with a small dry knock.

They both turned. The light went with them, and the room went black behind the light and stayed black. Then it was there again, and the room was the same room.

“Keep talking,” Voss said.

“About what.”

“About the pairs. You said pairs.”

“Three pairs.” He held up fingers and then put them down again. “That’s the arrangement. Six of them.”

“There are four in the pictures.”

“Then two are still in the ground.” Theo looked at the platform. “One pair at the door, with the beasts. Then the pair behind them — one’s stepping, one’s got its hands in the Collar. And the third pair hold the fans. Not swords. Fans. You don’t kill an intruder. You put him where he stays.”

“The fourth one in the pictures,” Voss said. “It had nothing in its hands.”

“I know,” Theo said, and left it there.

“Say the pairs again.”

“You’re checking whether I’m making it up.”

“Yes.”

He said them again. She listened with the light on the wall and did not correct anything.

“All right,” she said.

“Now what.”

“Now,” she said, “the ceiling. Shine it up.”

“I don’t have the flashlight.”

She put it into his hand. It was warm and heavy and it made his hand steadier by being in it. Her other hand went into her pocket and stayed there.

The ceiling was far up. He found the far wall first by accident, then the corner, and worked back toward the middle, and the beam was not a beam by then, it was a gray column with dust turning in it.

“There’s nothing,” he said. “There’s a — there’s a ledge. Along the wall. There’s a ledge and there’s something on it, it’s —“

He stopped.

Near the ceiling, in the far corner where the walls did not quite meet, two things were catching the light.

They were small. They were round. They were set the way eyes are set, and they were the color of an old coin, and the beam went into them and did not come back the way it went in.

He held the light there.

The dust kept turning in the column. Neither of them blinked.

Then, slowly — so slowly that for a moment he thought the light had moved — the two coins slid along the ledge, a hand’s width, and stopped, and they were still on him.